Craig Skibo's WebLog : Cool Sites

Visual Studio Developer Center

CraigSkibo — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 22:15:00 GMT

If you have not noticed, the Visual Studio Developer Center on MSDN is now live. You will be able to find articles, whitepapers, etc. about programming both Automation and VSIP for Visual Studio. Visit the Developer Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend.

You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

CraigSkibo — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 23:44:00 GMT

If you have not yet heard, we are all being moved over to the site weblogs.asp.net for posting our blogs. I am not sure I am fond of this idea for a few number reasons, mostly because now everybody needs to start looking in a different place on a site that has a name that is completely unrelated to VS. But hey, what can I do? Well, actually a lot. This has started me thinking about how blogging works, how it can be improved, and Korby and I have been talking about the neat things we can do. I started writing a little bit of code over last weekend to see how these ideas work out. The first step of this new code is a simple blog reader for VS that I hope to release within the next week or two. I am also trying to get a blogging site opened up for VS people, we will see how it works out.

For now, my blogs will now be going onto http://weblogs.asp.net/craigskibo. Any changes I make there will also be mirrored here until this site is closed to any new posts.

Automation samples update

CraigSkibo — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 23:30:00 GMT

Just seconds after making that last post, I received a message saying that the new set of automation samples are in the process of being propagated to the MSDN servers. We started working on these a while ago, and it took a while to get them out, but they have been upgraded for VS 2003 and a number of bug fixes have been made.

The URL for the page is here, but give it a few hours if something is not available yet since the files are still making their way around the server farm.

And while I am at it, you may also want to visit the VS Power Toys site at GotDotNet.com. There are a number of tools located there, some including sources (such as the Add-in I wrote, OnlineSearch), that you can use as samples.

To everything there is a season…

CraigSkibo — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 19:50:00 GMT

Well, today at 3:47 AM PST the Fall Equinox began. Cold temps, short days and long nights will become more and more common. Sometimes I miss those fall/winter days in Pennsylvania, waking up in the morning to 3ft of snow piled up outside and below zero temps. I literally did walk up hill both ways in the snow to get to school.

A good software program that I use for astronomy work (and where I found the 3:47 time given above) can be found at http://www.skyviewcafe.com. Be warned, it is written using Java (insert copyright notices on the name Java here, I am too lazy to do it myself) so you will need to have a JVM installed to use it. The source to an older version is available, and once I compiled it to .NET using J# with only minimal changes. That just shows how easy it is to convert Java to .NET with the J# compiler.

I tried working on my own version of an astronomy app using C# a few months ago, but because of time restraints I did not get much more done than calling off to a GPS receiver and then sending the results to http://terraserver-usa.com to translate that to a town name. Maybe I will post what I have to a GDN workspace (http://gotdotnet.com/community/workspaces/) and see what happens.